As I think we have discussed before, the answer to Miradon's question is as
long as a piece of string. In other words, it depends what you mean by an OA
repository.
If it is a repository to hold an institute's published output, the costs are
comparatively trivial. I have asked IR managers from India what the costs to
them were and they replied 'not very much', or 'we used existing resources'
or '2 people's salary for helping with deposit/formatting plus new PC
~$6055'. Clearly this needs to be translated into local currencies and to
meet different volumes of publications.
If on the other hand you are talking about a campus-wide resource containing
theses, educational packages, conference presentations and so on, then it's
a different ball game and is not what we are focussing on in this forum. It
is really important to define what you are talking about when quoting
figures as detractors will quote high figures for the all-embracing
scenario, whereas the cost of an OA repository, set up to hold an
institute's publications, is perfectly affordable by those in economically
constrained countries. And it's this that is necessary to enable access to
the world's published research and to speed scientific progress.
Barbara
.
----- Original Message -----
From: "N. Miradon" <nmiradon_at_YAHOO.FR>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2007 5:09 PM
Subject: Cost of running an OA repository
Does anyone have a good estimate of the real financial cost of
running an OA repository?
On this list, Hélène Bosc has recently told some of the
organisational obstacles in setting up an E-prints repository
[1] - but she didnt mention finance as an issue.
Also on this list, Dirk Pieper [2] drew attention to the 500th
repository listed at BASE [3]. Similarly, Scientific Commons
now covers 891 repositories in 51 countries [4]. From these
pages one can see which countries are well covered, and hence
deduce those which are not well covered. If one were to talk to
the laggards, I suppose that some would mention the cost of any
repository as a potential problem.
It could be useful to have in one's back pocket some robust, and
preferably audited, figures for fixed costs and running costs.
N.Miradon
[1]
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind07&L=american-scientist-open-a
ccess-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l&S=&P=113107
[2]
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind07&L=american-scientist-open-a
ccess-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l&S=&P=113744
[3]
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind07&L=american-scientist-open-a
ccess-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l&S=&P=113744
[4]
http://en.scientificcommons.org/repository/overview
Received on Sat Dec 08 2007 - 11:52:19 GMT